It is well known that the performance of mobile radio systems can be significantly enhanced by the application of adaptive antennas which consist of multi-element antenna arrays plus signal processing circuitry. In the thesis the utilization of such antennas as receive antennas in the uplink of mobile radio air interfaces of the type TD-CDMA is studied. Especially, the incorporation of covariance matrices of the received interference signals into the signal processing algorithms is investigated with a view to improve the system performance as compared to state of the art adaptive antenna technology. These covariance matrices implicitly contain information on the directions of incidence of the interference signals, and this information may be exploited to reduce the effective interference power when processing the signals received by the array elements. As a basis for the investigations, first directional models of the mobile radio channels and of the interference impinging at the receiver are developed, which can be implemented on the computer at low cost. These channel models cover both outdoor and indoor environments. They are partly based on measured channel impulse responses and, therefore, allow a description of the mobile radio channels which comes sufficiently close to reality. Concerning the interference models, two cases are considered. In the one case, the interference signals arriving from different directions are correlated, and in the other case these signals are uncorrelated. After a visualization of the potential of adaptive receive antennas, data detection and channel estimation schemes for the TD-CDMA uplink are presented, which rely on such antennas under the consideration of interference covariance matrices. Of special interest is the detection scheme MSJD (Multi Step Joint Detection), which is a novel iterative approach to multi-user detection. Concerning channel estimation, the incorporation of the knowledge of the interference covariance matrix and of the correlation matrix of the channel impulse responses is enabled by an MMSE (Minimum Mean Square Error) based channel estimator. The presented signal processing concepts using covariance matrices for channel estimation and data detection are merged in order to form entire receiver structures. Important tasks to be fulfilled in such receivers are the estimation of the interference covariance matrices and the reconstruction of the received desired signals. These reconstructions are required when applying MSJD in data detection. The considered receiver structures are implemented on the computer in order to enable system simulations. The obtained simulation results show that the developed schemes are very promising in cases, where the impinging interference is highly directional, whereas in cases with the interference directions being more homogeneously distributed over the azimuth the consideration of the interference covariance matrices is of only limited benefit. The thesis can serve as a basis for practical system implementations.

TD (Time Division)-CDMA is one of the partial standards adopted by 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) for 3rd Generation (3G) mobile radio systems. An important issue when designing 3G mobile radio systems is the efficient use of the available frequency spectrum, that is the achievement of a spectrum efficiency as high as possible. It is well known that the spectrum efficiency can be enhanced by utilizing multi-element antennas instead of single-element antennas at the base station (BS). Concerning the uplink of TD- CDMA, the benefits achievable by multi-element BS antennas have been quantitatively studied to a satisfactory extent. However, corresponding studies for the downlink are still missing. This thesis has the goal to make contributions to fill this lack of information. For near-to-reality directional mobile radio scenarios TD-CDMA downlink utilizing multi-element antennas at the BS are investigated both on the system level and on the link level. The system level investigations show how the carrier-to-interference ratio can be improved by applying such antennas. As the result of the link level investigations, which rely on the detection scheme Joint Detection (JD), the improvement of the bit er- ror rate by utilizing multi-element antennas at the BS can be quantified. Concerning the link level of TD-CDMA, a number of improvements are proposed which allow considerable performance enhancement of TD-CDMA downlink in connection with multi-element BS antennas. These improvements include * the concept of partial joint detection (PJD), in which at each mobile station (MS) only a subset of the arriving CDMA signals including those being of interest to this MS are jointly detected, * a blind channel estimation algorithm, * CDMA code pooling, that is assigning more than one CDMA code to certain con- nections in order to offer these users higher data rates, * maximizing the Shannon transmission capacity by an interleaving concept termed CDMA code interleaving and by advantageously selecting the assignment of CDMA codes to mobile radio channels, * specific power control schemes, which tackle the problem of different transmission qualities of the CDMA codes. As a comprehensive illustration of the advantages achievable by multi-element BS anten- nas in the TD-CDMA downlink, quantitative results concerning the spectrum efficiency for different numbers of antenna elements at the BS conclude the thesis.